William F. Buckley Jr.

William Frank Buckley Jr. (24 November 1925-27 February 2008) was an American conservative author and political commentator who founded the National Review magazine in 1955. Buckley was the father of modern American conservatism, with Bob Dole saying that Buckley "lit the fire."

Biography
William Francis Buckley was born in New York City, New York on 24 November 1925, the sixth of ten children born to Texas-born oil developer William Frank Buckley Sr.; his brother was the Republican Senator from New York, James L. Buckley. Buckley was schooled in England, and his family moved back to the United States during World War II, settling in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1944, he graduated from the US Army Officer Candidate School and served on the honor guard at Franklin D. Roosevelt's funeral in 1945, and he served stateside during World War II, attending Yale University after the war's end. He joined the conservative party of the Yale Political Union before graduating in 1950, and he worked for the CIA from 1951 to 1953.

During the 1950s, Buckley became a published author, and he helped with writing McCarthy and His Enemies, a 1954 book that defended Senator Joseph McCarthy as a patriotic crusader against communism. He left his job as an editor for The American Mercury due to its occasional anti-Semitism, and he decided to found his own conservative commentary magazine, The National Review, in 1955. He used his magazine to define the boundaries of conservatism, criticizing Ayn Rand, the John Birch Society, George Wallace, racists, white supremacists, and anti-Semites. Buckley initially opposed the Civil Rights movement and supported segregation until greater equality could be implemented, but he later came to admire Martin Luther King, Jr. (he supported the establishment of MLK Day), and he was a political rival of the segregationist George Wallace. In 1963-1964, he mobilized support for Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, and he was instrumental in the rise of the New Right Republicans. Buckley was an enthusiastic supporter of dictators Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet due to their anti-communist views, but he was far from fascist. Instead, Buckley favored the legalization and taxation of marijuana, opposed the Iraq War, criticized modern conservatism (lower-case "conservatism") for not being (upper-case) Conservatism (effectively right-libertarianism), and later favored banning tobacco products due to their role in his wife's death. Buckley died of a heart attack in his Stamford, Connecticut study on 27 February 2008 at the age of 82.